Last month I promised that I would do a 30-day experiment with the new micropayment service Flattr to see how much money I made, if any, and how well it worked (or might eventually work) as a business model.

I’ve now crossed the 30-day threshold (a few days late actually) and I’m here with an update.

To recap the idea of the experiment, Flattr is a cross between a social news site and a micropayment donation service. You add funds to your account and “Flattr” content you find interesting. Others do the same for your content. Every month, the amount you have in our account is divided up amongst the works you’ve Flattred and you receive funds from those who have Flattred you. If you get more than you give, you can withdraw the surplus revenue.

I had agreed to test the service for at least a month to see how it went. I added the Flattr button to every article on this site (right next to the Twitter button) and kept track of the stats. Now, a little bit over 30 days later, I’m back with a report.

Outcome

Over the 30 days the experiment ran, I received some 8 Flattrs. Seven of the Flattrs were for the original post and one stray Flattr was for a previous post on Embed Anything. All totaled those eight Flattrs ended up being worth €1.19 in revenue, or about $1.55.

However, since I spent about €5 ($6.50) to set up the account, I actually lost approximately €3.8 ($4.95)over the month using Flattr. In short, I actually went into the hole slightly trying to make Flattr work.

On the other side of the coin, things weren’t much better. Despite my best attempts to find good content to Flattr. Very few sites I read ran the buttons. Only two sites I regularly visit, TechDirt and TorrentFreak, actually use the buttons. I ended up only Flattring two things, one was an article on Torrentfreak and the other was actually a test.

However, I probably would have Flattred a great deal more if I had remembered I was supposed to. Looking back over the month, there were several other stories that may have been worth a Flattr but, without seeing the buttons regularly, I simply forgot to follow up.

With Flattr, unlike tweeting and email linking, are not a part of my daily “sharing” routine, and just didn’t feel natural. It is clearly going to take a few more months of use to become more normal.

Still, the month gave me an idea of what to expect from Flattr and my conclusions are fairly mixed at this time.

Is Flattr Worthwhile?

It’s almost impossible to say anything conclusive about Flattr or the notion of micropayment donations after just one month. Not only is one month not long enough to reach any good conclusions, but the market penetration in the U.S. for Flattr is pretty weak and almost certainly will improve.

Still, it’s hard to say that the results were anything but discouraging.

Though eight Flattrs is not very bad for a service with little penetration in my home country, it only achieved a $1.50 (€1.19) in revenue and, thanks to forced participation of about $3 (€2) there wasn’t much that I could hope to do in terms of earning any money.

The bigger problem though is all the trouble I had with Flattr. I mentioned many of the problems in my first report but the month seemed to be plagued with problems with the service in general. The buttons would disappear from the site for long periods of time, would load very slowly and generally the service didn’t seem to work very well.

Since I couldn’t Flattr my content, I have no idea if these problems were preventing people from participating but it was something I noticed repeatedly when visiting this site.

But despite the problems and the fact I lost money, I’m not ready to write off Flattr just yet.

Speaking for Flattr

My friend Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, who runs the great Copy, Shake and Paste Blog reported to me that Flattr has done very well in Germany, where she is from. There, some sites have made upwards of €500 ($650) per month, not enough to earn a living from, but certainly enough to pay even a very high hosting bill.

This seems to mesh with what I’m seeing on the Flattr site. Most of the articles listed on the site are in German (or at least what appears to be German) and the payment troubles I had when setting up my account were largely due to the site is geared toward visitors from the EU. This presence shouldn’t be a surprise given that the company is based in Sweden, but it might also explain the slowdowns and other problems I experienced.

In short, either a U.S.-based competitor to Flattr or a greater presences here in the states could help me get a great deal more out of the service and make this an experiment well worth running again.

Bottom Line

I haven’t fully decided what I’m going to do with Flattr now. I’ll likely remove it but I may leave it up for another month or two in a bid to continue the experiment. However, if it continues to slow down my site’s loading time and create other problems, it may go away well before that.

In the end, I see the potential for a service like Flattr to work and I am definitely interested in the possibility. I want to give it as fair of a shake as possible but, until it reaches greater penetration into the U.S., it probably won’t be a practical solution for me.

Still, the idea is there and even though my initial results were mixed at best, I am not ready to write it off.

Story Updated: See below

Back in April of this year Digg introduced a URL shortening services that caused a great deal of controversy. The problem was that, unlike other URL shorteners that simply redirected the user to the actual page, Digg’s put the site in a frame that displayed the “DiggBar” across the top. This meant that that Web sites would not receive search engine benefit from Digg links and many felt that Digg was unfairly using other people’s sites to boost traffic to their own domain as well as causing confusion among end users.

When confronted with the legal and ethical issues that come with framing a site, as well as a massive user uproar, Digg backed off and decided to use a standard 301 redirect on all users who were not logged in, including search engines, and reserved the DiggBar for logged in Digg users. Though it wasn’t a perfect compromise, it seemed to appease most.

However, earlier this week, Techruch, Mashable and others began to report that the behavior of Digg’s short URLs began to change. Digg short URLs, for non-logged-in users, were no longer redirecting to the site, but to Digg’s landing page for the article, which in turn links to the full work.

Also immediately the story began to flare up again. However, this time, bloggers weren’t the only ones who were upset. Twitter users and others that had shared digg.com links were angry that there was no notification about the redirect. Digg was getting it from all sides and, once again, Digg appears to be backing down.

But what are the legal issues with this kind of redirect? The answer is, strangely, not many.

Digg, the Redirect and the Law

What is strange about the latest Digg redirect is that, in contrast to the DiggBar, which raised a slew of potential issues, this one raises almost none.

Though Digg does not have a special terms of use for its URL shortening service, its main terms of use does a pretty good job of limiting its liability. Most likely, anyone who used Digg’s URL service and had their links redirected would not have much grounds to sue for.

However, even without the TOS, it is unclear exactly what such a lawsuit would be. The links point to Digg’s server and they have a right to manage and alter their server as they see fit. For example, if you linked to this article but I later redirected it to an update, would that be a violation of the law? Even if the “update” was on another site, it would still be difficult to prove that any law had been broken or damages had been incurred. However, it would probably stop you from linking to this site in the future.

Since the Digg URLs are not framing sites, which raises trademark, copyright and other issues, but is instead linking to the original site, deep linking being completely legal, there isn’t much of an avenue for an attack in the courts. One might argue some form of “interference”, but that seems difficult to argue for many reasons.

However, it seems as if the legal implications are the farthest from people’s minds. For most, it appears that this never was a legal issue so much as it is an issue of ethics and trust.

Trust is Key

The bigger issue with the change is how it affects the trust of those who have put their faith in Digg. This change was made with no public acknowledgement, no notification and no warning. The issue was only discovered after users filed technical support requests with Digg and found that the service was working as intended.

To users that have created Digg URLs and Webmasters that have encouraged the practice, this is a tremendous breach of trust. Digg publicly promised that its URL system would work a specific way and then changed it without warning. Some have likened this to taking a highway that goes to one city and redirecting it to another without warning the cars driving along it. It’s an apt analogy for the most part.

Legally, Digg has the right to do what it wishes with the URLs on its service. It also makes one wonder what would happen if TinyURL, Bitly or any of the other URL shortening services took a similar approach. The backlash, no doubt, would be incredible.

On the Web, trust is everything. Though Digg URLs seem to still be very common no Twitter, if Digg’s service can’t be shown to provide a consistent and predictable service, it seems likely that users will abandon it. On that front, there is no shortage of alternatives.

Bottom Line

In the end, the news appears to be good. Digg’s CEO Kevin Rose sent out a Twitter tweet stating that he was unaware of the change to the Digg URL service and hinted that he was not happy about them. Also, in my testing of Digg.com URLs this morning, most seem to be redirecting straight to the actual site, though a large percentage are still going to Digg. A Digg URL that I created as a test, Also seems to redirect correctly.

However, this incident has only highlighted how unreliable Digg’s service is and how inconsiderate it can be to the wishes of not just Webmasters, but their own users.

I decided to do a comparison search for bit.ly URLs to see how many of those were being posted. The difference was astounding. Though Digg URLs are popular on Twitter, there is currently well over 100x more Bit.ly ones being posted than Digg.com ones. Though most of this is because Bit.ly is now Twitter’s default service for URL shortening, it doesn’t seem likely that Digg is going to gain any ground when its own users can’t trust the URL is going to go where it is supposed to.

In short, Digg has shot itself in the foot in a major way with this blunder, washing away what little trust it had after the DiggBar controversy and making itself even more of an enemy to Webmasters and users alike.

This is not how you build a successful business. I just hope Digg learns that lesson before it is too late.

Update: Digg has posted an official blog entry on the topic. According to the post items that have NOT been submitted to Digg previously will be redirected to the source (why my URL did not work) and all Digg URLs created before the change should now forward to the original source as well, as they were before the change. However, all articles that have been submitted to Digg will have their Digg URL redirect to the Digg landing page.

Digg has long been heralded as one of the best and most ethical ways to handle content aggregation. It’s practice of very limited content copying with direct, high-profile linking, has made it something of a standards-bearer on the Web for other sites wanting to get into the business.

However, that reputation took something of a hit last week. Digg announced its new DiggBar along with its new URL shortening service. The new bar, rather than linking directly to the page being Dugg, puts the page in an iframe below a small Digg-hosted pane. This keeps the URL, the visitor and the search engines on the Digg domain while loading the Dugg page.

This has proved to be a very divisive new feature. Power Digg uers like the ability to interact with Digg while reading the article and Twitter users love the new URL shortener. However, some casual Digg users are frustrated with the new URLs (it can make sharing articles more difficult) and content creators are upset that Digg is no longer linking directly to their site.

Some have gone so far as to hint that the DiggBar may be content theft and an attempt to boost their own traffic at the expense of the people they link to.

This begs the question, is Digg doing something unethical or even illegal? The answers are not simple.

Some History

(Note: This is a very simplistic description of framing for those who are unfamiliar with how it works). The technique that Digg uses to create its DiggBar is known as an iframe or inline frame. Iframes allow developers to create the effect of a “page within a page”.

In many ways, an iframe is similar to a YouTube embed. When a site embeds a YouTube clip, they are displaying the content, which is pulled from YouTube’s server and is under their control, as an element on their page. The difference is, rather than a line of JavaScript, iframe uses an HTML tag to tell the Web browser to pull the content from another page and fill a portion of the screen with it.

The result is that, when you look at the source code of DiggBar page, you’ll see the code for the content of the DiggBar itself and what amounts to a link to the source content. However, rather than creating a clickable link, the iframe opens the content below the bar.

The technique has been around since 1996 and was heavily frowned upon when it first became popular. Initially it was used both for creating sites, such as having navigation next to or on top of the main content, and for “framing” outgoing links, such as what Digg is doing.

As a site development technique, it lost its popularity largely due to its poor performance with the search engines (search engines, especially then, only seemed to read the frame page, not the pages within it). As a method of linking, it was largely shunned as being bad form or even greedy.

However, in recent years, framing has begun to make something of a comeback. Though About.com has used iframes on many of its external links for years, StumbleUpon reintroduced many to it by using it as part of its site, to help people vote up and down links without a browser add-on. Also, several URL shortening services, such as Owl.ly, have been using iframes to add features and keep track of stats.

For the most part, the response to framing has been fairly muted. However, Digg is the by far the largest site to make such a broad use of framing (save perhaps Facebook, which adds an iframe to some outbound links) and that, combined with the fact Digg’s primary function is to link to other sites, has made it a target.

But is framing illegal? It is a good question that hasn’t been wholly answered.

The Law on Framing

The case law on framing is surprisingly thin. Though the technique has been around for over a decade and several suits/disputes have come out of it, all of the cases seem to have been settled out of court.

However, the case of Washington Post v. TotalNews may provide some clues as to the potential legal risks. The case, which was settled in 1997, saw The Washington Post sue a news startup called TotalNews because the site was using frames to link to Washington Post content rather than plain hyperlinks.

In the case, there were three primary objections that seem potentially relevant to the DiggBar:

1. Trademark Infringement: Displaying one’s logo over another person’s content could be seen as implying a relationship between the two that does not exist and that, in turn could, be considered trademark infringement. For example, if the New York Times felt that the DiggBar was causing people to believe that Digg sponsored the newspaper or that the NYT endorsed Digg, they might have grounds for a trademark suit. Furthermore, if the NYT felt that the DiggBar caused confusion as to the origin of the reporting, they might have similar grounds.
2. Copyright Infringement: Though framing doesn’t make an actual copy of the page that is being framed, one could argue that framing both violates the distribution right under copyright law and that it creates a derivative work based upon the original. Either of these would be a violation of the copyright holder’s exclusive rights, if it could be shown.
3. Tortious interference with Business Relationships: By reducing the amount of visible area on the page and running their own advertisements (should they appear), the DiggBar could be accused of interfering with existing advertising partnerships on various sites.

None of these items are a perfect fit and all require a bit of stretching. However, it is easy to see how, in each case, an argument could be made and be successful. But since the TotalNews case was settled out of court, with TotalNews agreeing to stop using frames, there are no legal rulings on these issues.

The question is not just whether these approaches could work, but whether they could work in 2009, with more tech-savvy judges. It is very difficult to say and there are no clear answers.

Still, there are clearly many ways that a litigious-minded content creator could sue Digg for the DiggBar.

The Ethics of Framing

If the legalities of framing are muddled, then the ethics are divisive. Some people feel that framing is perfectly acceptable, others think of it as a form of content theft. It is often a matter of personal perspective.

Those who do object to framing typically do so on one of three grounds:

1. SEO Issues: Though there is some debate as to how framing affects search engine ranking, at least one blogger has seen lower PageRank posts get bumped from Google in favor of Digg URLs already (see comments). It is pretty clear that linking to a page with the content in a frame does less good in the search engines than just linking to it directly.
2. Advertising and Integrity: Though the DiggBar doesn’t display ads yet, it is foreseeable that it will at some point. Many sites don’t allow ads sites that link by framing are the only way that ads are displayed along side their content. Many people aren’t comfortable with other sites earning money directly off of their content, especially when they aren’t doing so themselves. Furthermore, other sites don’t like their pages to be altered in any way, including via framing.
3. Visitor Interference: Framing not only reduces the screen real estate that the visitor has to read the content, but it also impedes their ability to copy the source link. Though Digg is also billing itself as a URL shortening service, there are still many cases where one wants to copy the full, original URL (IE: Three Count columns). Framing makes that more difficult to do and encourages users to pass around links to other domains.

(Note: Do you have a particular objection I missed? Leave it in the comments and I may add it in.)

The end result is that even Webmasters who are not outraged by framing still, usually, prefer direct links for most things. The question is whether or no Webmasters will be outraged enough by the DiggBar to try and force them to change.

Breaking the DiggBar

Since framing is over a decade old, so are the techniques for breaking them. If you don’t want the DiggBar, or any such frame, to display over your site, all you have to do is add a few lines of JavaScript code to “break out” of the frame.

The technique does work on the DiggBar, as it will any iframe-based system. However, it will not fix the SEO issues mentioned above since search engines will still see the frame page and can not process the JavaScript on your page to know that you do not want the frame there.

In short, this technique only helps ensure that visitors do not see your site with the DiggBar, search engines and other spiders will still see Digg’s content with a reference to yours.

Personal Thoughts

I’ve always been of two minds when it comes to framing. Sometimes, as with StumbleUpon, there is a legitimate use to the framing and little harm done by it (StumbleUpon links don’t pass along any Google benefit that I know of and the framing is necessary for the site to work). Other times, as with About.com, it is a play to maintain advertising and a presence as the visitors leaves the site, all at the expense of the target URL.

The DiggBar falls somewhere between. It isn’t necessary for Digg to work, Digg got along just fine without it, and the features it creates are not that important. Digg could have just as easily made a URL shortening service without the DiggBar (perhaps linking to Digg’s permalink). However, the bar does make Digg easier to use and provides features power users will find compelling, including comments and related links.

However, do these features justify the treatment webmasters are getting at the hands of Digg? I don’t believe so. Digg is expanding its presence into the sites it links to and those sites, in turn, get a short URL and the traffic Digg provides (which can be quite a lot for items on home page items). Whether or not that is a good trade overall will depend on the webmaster, but it clearly isn’t as good of a trade as everyone got before.

I’m not so much outraged by Digg as I am disappointed. Digg has always been the poster child for how to run a business off of other people’s content in a way that was fair to content creators. They built a great community and supported the Webmasters they link to. The DiggBar tilts that relationship more in favor of Digg and without any real consultation with bloggers.

I’m not ready to liken Digg to RSS scrapers and spam bloggers, but they certainly have made a misstep here that hurts webmasters. My hope is that they will back away from this or find a way to reintroduce the features without the drawbacks to the external links, but they seem pretty set on it.

Digg may not be evil, but they are certainly more evil then they were two weeks ago.

Bottom Line

Framing isn’t going anywhere and the flagging economy, especially the advertising market, is only going to make things worse. As sites work to squeeze every advertising dollar they can out of their sites, more and more will turn to this technique to make a few bucks.

However, the legal issues of framing are far from settled and the ethical ones are about as divisive as you can get. Any site that uses this tactic does so at their own risk and it is only a matter of time before someone challenges the techniques both in and out of the courts.

If I were Digg, I would be seriously considering whether the risks associated with this move outweigh the benefits, especially over the long term.

In the meantime, if you don’t like the idea of Digg framing your site, using the frame breaking script will prevent it. I am not going to install it here (as I said, there are other sites with a legitimate use for framing) but it is there for those who need it.

I’m going to have to rethink my relationship with Digg. Having been the subject of two front page stories over the years, I know well how much traffic it can bring. But with the new DiggBar, I have to analyze both what good that traffic will do and also what the long term benefits of being on Digg are.

A recent post in the New York Times entitled “Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt” has caused a controversy on the Web. The article, by Brian Stetler, talks about the frustrations of copyright holders, specifically large media companies, with sites such as the Huffington Post and Silicon Valley Insider, that routinely excerpt and repeat information from them with a link back.

The article quotes Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, as saying, “They (the news organizations) think they need to defend their turf more aggressively.”

This has become a very hot topic in journalism circles in the last few months. Last month, Scott Baradell, a former journalist and executive at Belo Media, wrote that newspapers are running out of time to deal with their “content theft” problem. It has also taken off in blogging/social media circles as well as yesterday, following the NY Times article, Allen Stern on Center Networks wrote an article about about why scraping will only get worse.

These are among dozens of op-eds and blog posts on this topic. However, the question that has been raised by all of them is simple enough, when does copying, even excerpted and attributed, become something that harms content creators and what, if anything, should they do about it?

Answering it, however, is far more difficult than asking it.

The State of the Scraping Web

In Stern’s follow-up, he wrote that there are two types of scrapers “Those who scrape full rss feeds and those who scrape just enough to keep you on their site and keep the conversation there as well.” Though he originally thought the first type was the bad kind and the second was tolerable, he now feels that both kinds “suck”.

If I have noticed any shift or changing scraping over the past three years it has been that there are fewer and fewer “whole feed” scrapers to be found. Though there are still many on the Web, there has been a huge shift to partial feed scraping. When I look through my FairShare feed for this site and other sites I monitor, I see almost no blogs scraping more than a few dozen words.

I have been timid about going after these sites though many are clearly just spam blogs. By using such short excerpts, even though most violate my CC license or the licenses of my friends, they are giving themselves a decent fair use argument and they aren’t hurting either in any meaningful way.

However, there has been a new group of sites that have begun to push the boundaries between scrapers and social news/networking sites. As Stern pointed out, these sites scrape content and then encourage users to to comment, vote and socialize on generally stay on their site rather than visiting the original. I instantly think of SocialMedian and Fav.or.it when I ponder these sites.

Though the two sites above scrape significant portions of the post and even hotlink images, two things that has raised a lot of concern among many bloggers, there have been a new crop of scrapers that take only a small part of the content and add social news features such as voting and commenting. Though these sites may look like Digg or Reddit, it is clear that the content is not user-submitted and the human element only comes in after the fact.

In short, what is happening is scrapers have been shifting their focus, trying to improve their legitimacy both in the eyes of copyright law and in terms of users. With that, some have turned their attention away from blind attempts to game the search engines toward keeping users and building repeat traffic.

This has been a constant headache for me in the past few months and education/outreach attempts have been largely unsuccessful at producing any real change.

The Human Element

The area that Stern only touched on, which was actually the crux of the original New York Times column, is the human aspect of this. Many blogs have built quite a reputation on gathering news from other sources, excerpting and linking to it. Huffington Post, my most accounts, is the poster child for this kind of blogging and has turned it into a very successful business, one with over 20 million pageviews per month according to the article.

Though the Huffington Post has begun to do its own reporting, much of its content is still just excerpts and links to other articles. The question is whether the links it provides back to the content sources is adequate “compensation” for the content used. Many in the news industry feel that these sites are “leeches”, doing nothing to pay for the reporting and writing of an article but building an entire businesses around their use of other’s content even though the only value typically added is the organization and any additional commentary.

Even though most still feel excerpting and linking is, on the whole, a positive force, many news organizations have begun to recoil and are re-raising paywalls and shying away from their open attitude on free content. It is clear that many have reached the conclusion that “free” is not a viable long-term strategy for content that costs money to produce for the Web.

The question though becomes, what about the rest of us? Whether we’re blogging for fun, to promote a business or to earn ad revenue, we still spend hours writing posts and creating new works. Excerpting can affect us too. Good excerpting can drive tons of traffic and visitors, bad excerpting takes it away. Furthermore, many bloggers, including myself with the “3 Count” series, use excerpting alongside with original commentary. We certainly don’t want to harm or detract from those we pull from.

But where is the line drawn and how can anyone tell what side of the fence they are on?

Finding Guidance

As the New York Times article discussed, fair use guidelines in the U.S. are far too ambiguous to be of much use in this area. There are no “hard line” rules with fair use and everything is decided on a case-by-case basis.

While that maximized the flexibility in the law, it also causes headaches when trying to set up simple rules. Attributor, a company I have consulted with, took a stab at setting some “bright line” rules on their blog, suggesting the following three rules:

1. Excerpt must contain a link.
2. Excerpt must use less than 50% of the original content.
3. Excerpt must also use less than 100 words.

Though they admit that the exact numbers are up for debate, they feel that a combination of percentage and word count can be used to compile a good standard.

However, Silicon Valley Insider, one of the blogs mentioned in the New York Times article for its heavy use of excerpting, has taken a more “golden rule” approach to the problem and defined their excerpting policy as simply, “We excerpt others the way we hope others will excerpt us.” Though they open the door for excerpting well outside the boundaries of what Attributor laid out in their rules, they did say that they would work with content creators that feel the blog took too much or did not provide clear enough attribution.

What has become clear is that “fair” truly is in the eye of the beholder, something I strongly agree with in the Silicon Valley Insider post, and that what one blogger considers right another will consider wrong. For example, even though I’ve done everything I can to make the “3 Count” column as fair to the original reporters as possible, including large links, limited quoting and adding original commentary, many will likely think it to be bad form.

As true as it is, it doesn’t help bloggers that seek to reuse content while doing the right thing nor does it help those who’ve had their content use on borderline sites.

Excerpting is one giant gray area and it is getting uglier by the minute.

My Personal Experience

Recently, my article about CC0 took off, receiving a Slashdot and a mention on Ars Technica.

As a result of this, my article has been quoted and excerpted countless time. My FairShare feed has been lit up with quotes from the article over the past few days as it has appeared on many blogs of varying sizes. Nearly all of the uses have involved short quotes, almost always with proper links.

Though I have seen some traffic from those mentions, it certainly has only been a small percentage of visitors to those sites. It has been more of a trickle than a flood from these blogs.

However, this isn’t to say that I think those sites “ripped me off” or did anything wrong. On the contrary, I’m very glad that they liked the article enough to quote it and link to it. I’m very happy with how that article did and caught quite off guard by the attention it received.

On the sites that I visited, it seemed that everyone was doing what was both right and legal. Even if we discarded my CC license and assumed I wanted to stop this kind of behavior, fair use would probably have prevented me from taking any action. Even though I only received a small number of visitors, they are people who never would have found my site otherwise and the fact many visitors didn’t click through is not the fault of those that used the content. The visitors, for whatever reason, were not interested.

To me, proper excerpting is not about bright lines, but about symbiosis, making sure that the creators of the original work gain from your use as much as possible. Though I don’t think I am ready to accept the Silicon Valley Insider’s “golden rule” approach to the process, laws and feelings other than your own still have to be considered, I’m not in favor of bright line rules, such as Attributor’s either. Though the latter can be useful as loose guidelines, the type of thing editors would send to their reporters, but not as an absolute rule.

The reason excerpting doesn’t work as well as we would like is because visitors routinely don’t follow through to the source. Even the best use of an excerpt will only pass along a small percentage of visitors to the original story. Though there are exceptions to that rule, such as sites like Digg and Reddit (these are sites where the “easiest” path is to the original site), most of the time visitors don’t click through, it’s that simple.

As surfers, we are all guilty of that, we’ve all read a post with an excerpt and moving on without checking out the source. We probably do it hundreds of times a day without realizing it. First off, it is infeasible from a time standpoint, second, sometimes the excerpt is all we need or want.

That’s understandable, and it explains why even proper excerpting can feel like a very unbalanced relationship.

Bottom Line

If you’re a blogger or are otherwise posting content on the Web, you are automatically involved in three different ways. First, as someone who is going to have their work turned into excerpts, as someone who is going to use other people’s work, either as quotes or as research, and as a visitor reading excerpted content and deciding whether or not to click through.

Though bright line rules can provide some guidance, the only solution that is going to work is respect. Whenever we do any of these things, we have to show respect to the others involved. We have to work when using other people’s content to attribute correctly and ensure they gain from the use, we have to be respectful of other’s rights to use our content within some limited capacity and, as we surf the Web and share links, we have to work to ensure we find reference original sources or at least sites with original commentary.

Are mistakes going to be made? Yes. Are some people going to go too far and need to be called on it? Yes. But if we keep it in our minds that the people who do the research, write the articles and create the content deserve the lion’s share of the reward and let that guide our actions, for the most part we’ll be ok.

Though big content creators like newspapers and magazines are going to have to hammer out business strategies to keep their doors open as they transition to the Web, bloggers and smaller content creators have a different, albeit similar, set of concerns.

In the end, we all have to work together. The difference between the good guys and the spammers is that the latter doesn’t care if the creator gets any of their due. If they work within the law, it is only because it is easier, not because it is the right thing to do. Good neighbors on the Web consider these issues and, though they might reach conflicting conclusions, at least try to offer support back to creators.

We should focus as much on the true bad guys of the Web, they are the ones doing by far the most harm and, while this conversation is important to have for many reasons, it can’t be a distraction either.

There are plenty of real scumbags on the Web to fight.

The site, according to Klug, was getting about 2,000 visits per day when it was forgotten but is almost certainly doing much better now as it has taken off, attracting countless Twitter Tweets and other social news attention. Librarians and teachers are especially captivated by this site.

But is “The Plagiarism Checker” worth using? Is it as powerful of a tool as some, although not the site itself, have made it to be? The sad answer is no, but it could, with a few simple tweaks, become a much more useful service for teachers and bloggers alike.

How it Works

The basic premise of the minimalist site can be summed up by its instructions:

Cut & paste your students paper or homework assignment into the box below, and click the “check” button. This free plagiarism detector will find plagiarized text in homework and other essays/reports.

In short, you take an essay, article or other lengthy prose work, paste it into a textbox and hit “check”. From there, the site extracts several strings of text, runs them through Google and compiles the result, determining whether plagiarism is probable.

In that regard, the idea is actually very similar to Copyscape, which also uses Google via their API, to process results. However, where Copyscape’s keeps the “magic” hidden from the user, the “Dustball” plagiarism checker includes links to the Google results, encouraging users to click through and research the case for themselves.

That alone is a big part of the problem Webmasters, and many teachers, will have with the service. Where Copyscape, as well as academic tools such as TurnItIn, provide very simple and colorful results, The Plagiarism Checker is a very bare-bones approach, requiring the user to perform a large amount of research on their own.

Still, a bit of research will be welcomed if the service produces great results, unfortunately, it seems that the service performs only lukewarm, at best.

My Tests

To test the service, I decided to run it through a similar battery of tests that I had run Copyscape through and then watched as they improved upon the initial results.

The first test was to run an old poem of mine through the system, one that allegedly has over 300 matches in Google. However, that test was thwarted as The Plagiarism Checker refused to even look at the work, saying that it could not function with such short text strings.

I then shifted gears and started using prose works, the first being one that had 36 matches in Google at the time I did the search. The result was stunning.

Despite the fact Google had reported three dozen matches on test snippets from the work itself, the “Dustball” checker was unable to find anything. To make matters worse, using some of the sample quotes from the test, I was able to locate other copies of the work, such as with the first quote.

Clearly, The Plagiarism Checker was missing results that Google was finding, meaning it was discarding them for whatever reason.

A similar test for another prose work only returned one sentence that was matched against anything and the results for it were all false positives. This work, in Google, has six results.

The only search using the service that seemed to work remotely well was when I ran the Declaration of Independence through it. Every search term, in this test, came back positive.

It appears that text that is not widely distributed around the Web may or may not show up as plagiarized in this work, something that has me very worried as many are starting to rely on this plagiarism checker as their main tool for detecting both copyright infringement and the plagiarism of students.

The Sad Truth

Simply put, any and all of these search results should have come back as being plagiarized. Even if there were no other matches of the content, these works existed on my site and are available through Google there. There is no reason that any of these works should have come back as anything short of 100% plagiarized since this site can not know I was the one submitting them.

For teachers, this is not good news. Is a student plagiarizes material from obscure sources, they are likely to escape detection. Likewise, Webmasters and those that might want to use this tool to track their own content, will likely be disappointed that it doesn’t seem to pick up when the infringement is only a few dozen sites.

This can most likely be fixed through tweaks in the algorithm, but as it sits right now, it doesn’t appear that it has much to offer teachers or Webmasters, especially when Copyscape is relatively effective and cheap to use.

Simply put, at this moment, Copyscape is easier, more effective and faster than The Plagiarism Checker and, at only five cents a search, is affordable too.

However, the best technique still appears to be taking the time to select good phrases from a work and manually searching for those. It returns the most results and seems to work well nearly all of the time.

The Big Picture

My issue with The Plagiarism Checker has less to do with the service itself and more to do with how others have been promoting it. The site itself is actually fairly humble about what it can do, but bloggers and Twitter users have been advertising it as if it were a silver bullet to detect plagiarism. Clearly, that is not the case.

With a few tweaks and fixes to the algorithm, I don’t doubt that this service, much like Copyscape, could become a very powerful tool. However, even if the results were on par with Copyscape, the latter remains faster and easier to use, meaning that there will not be much reason to use the “Dustball” checker.

To make matters worse, most teachers and professors have access to services such as TurnItIn that are far more accurate and covers a much larger breadth of sources than “The Plagiarism Checker”. Considering the ease of us and added features, there is not much that can be gleaned from a Google-only search, that can’t be gleaned from the more automated service (Though Copyscape did top Turnitin in a recent plagiarism detection study).

In short, I don’t see much usefulness for this tool, even if its accuracy improves, and I and more than a little confused as to why so many seem to have promoted it so heavily.

Conclusions

More than anything, this is a case against the reliance on any one plagiarism checking service. Even the best services will let results slip through the cracks. Furthermore, just because a service is popular does not mean that it should be trusted above all.

However, I find it very difficult to fault The Plagiarism Checker for this confusion and these problems. It is clear that the service was as much an experiment as anything, it is promoted humbly and was actually abandoned for approximately six years. It was others, perhaps desperate for some way to more effectively detect plagiarism, that gave it an unjustified reputation.

If anything, this case shows the need and the potential market for such services and illustrates why some companies have made millions in this field. People are eager for a solution and are excited by any promise of one.

Sadly though, this site is not the one people are looking for.

photo credit: rindsey

A recent comment by Cybele reminded me of an article I wrote in 2006 entitled “Cease and Desist: A Dying Art“.

The article lamented the cease and desist letter was using its usefulness when dealing with copyright infringement issues, giving way to DMCA and other forms of host contact. At that time, less than a quarter of all my plagiarism cases were handled by direct contact with the alleged infringer.

However, it seems that the trend has continued to work against the cease and desist. Social networking, blogging and spamming have combined to make such direct contact almost impossible. Though I remain a big proponent of direct contact, it has become such a rarity that I can almost not remember the last time I successful worked directly with an infringer directly.

This has me both saddened and deeply worried.

There are ways to fix these issues, but it will take a shift in the Internet itself, something that isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

Cause of Death

In the eight years or so since I have started dealing with plagiarism issues, the Web has changed in drastic ways, many of which make personal contact very difficult to achieve. Specifically, there have been three issues that caused the cease and desist letter to gain dust in most people’s anti-plagiarism arsenal.

1. Social Networking: Though social networking doesn’t create a walled garden of content, meaning that it is possible to detect plagiarism or copyright infringement that takes place on most such sites (Facebook being an exception), they do create a walled garden of contact, making it so that you have to sign up for an account, friend the user and then use their custom messenger to reach out to them. On the most basic level, this is time consuming but it is also very legally dangerous as you have an uncertain paper trail in the event of a dispute.
2. Spam Blogging: Spammers have become some of the most common and most dangerous infringers but they also go to great lengths to keep their identities and contact information hidden. Furthermore, if you do manage to reach them, odds are they will not respond as they have little to gain by complying.
3. Fear of Email Spam: As email spam has taken off, Webmasters have become more cautious about putting their addresses on their sites. Bloggers are routinely advised not to put their email address on their site, obfuscated or not, and most seem to focus on driving people to other means of contact that carry other rewards. Whether it is about adding followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook or buddies on IM, email has fallen out of favor. This is compounded by domain privacy services, which this site does use, false whois information and people opting for hosted blogs instead of their own domain.

As such, a surprisingly small number of sites I approach actually have contact information for Webmaster and, those that do, the information routinely turns out to be incorrect. The few times I have made an earnest effort in recent months have all been thwarted by outdated information or stoic silence.

Why This is Bad

At first glance, the DMCA might seem to be preferable in every way. It is faster, standardized, easy to use and takes only a few moments. Best of all, it is amazingly reliable on most sites.

However, cease and desist letters provide some potentially powerful opportunities. First, they provide the chance to educate users about copyright and encourages infringers to handle the problem themselves. Many times infringement is a mistake, not an act of malice and this helps to provide new information and ensure that the person will not repeat the error.

More importantly though, where a DMCA is nothing but a takedown, a cease and desist provides an opportunity to keep the work up, but with proper licensing. If you use a Creative Commons license, for example, this lets the infringer fix the problems with their use and bring it up to code. This encourages not only good content use, but also linking in general, creating a symbiotic relationship.

It is to everyone’s advantage if copyright holders and infringers can work out their differences face to face, but only if it can be done quickly enough to make it worthwhile. Too much effort, and it becomes easier to file the DMCA and move on.

Exceptions to the Rule

There are a few exceptions to this rule, one of the main ones being Web 2.0 companies that may misuse content as part of their service. Sites such as Shyftr were blasted for their content reuse policies but, in at least some of the cases, have been able to resolve their differences with content creators and rebuild their service to everyone’s benefit.

However, this only works for legitimate companies with a real interest in working with copyright holders. Sites that have no such interest and are just seeking to make money in the gray area between aggregation and spamming will not cooperate.

Those sites, sadly, do demand a DMCA notice or other such action to stop the misuse.

Solutions

Fixing this problem is going to be tricky to say the least. There are two possible ways in which the Web could change to make cease and desist letter more practical again.

First, email could make a comeback as a means of communication. Though we are sending more email than ever, it is clear browsing around the Web that many, if not most, people prefer other means of contact. Though services such as Gmail have gone a long way to making email more fun and usable, many still can not wait until the service falls into obsolescence.

The second possibility is that another service, much like email, will rise to make such communication easy again. With social networks trying to open up their doors more and even interact with one another there could come a time when one sends a private message to another user from their native account, even if they are on two different services. Though the result would be extremely email-like in nature, it would fit more comfortably with the social networking scheme that is developing.

However, neither of these things are likely soon and neither would help deal with spammers or others that don’t wish to be found, but it could help with bloggers and others that have a sincere interest in doing the right thing.

Conclusions

It is strange to think that, in this age of near-instant communication with anyone, anywhere, that we are finding it harder and harder to reach out privately to strangers we have an issue with. However, this is exactly the case.

The implications of this problem go far beyond just copyright and plagiarism issues. It is something of a great social experiment where we seem to resolve almost all of our disagreements in the most public of the public spheres and the results have not been that impressive.

If there is one thing that I would change about the Internet, it would be this rush to air grievances out in publicly, to attack others publicly while hiding behind a veil of anonymity and forget that there are people at the other end of every communication we send out.

It’s a tall order, but I do think it would make the Web a better place.

I’ve been working to reconnect with both old friends and current colleagues. If you’ve emailed me over the past few years, there’s a decent chance that I’ve already sent out a friend request.

However, I am eager to hear from those I might have missed as well as anyone who has not contacted me but is interested in connecting with me.

In that interest, I’ve also created a blog page for Plagiarism Today.

I am admittedly unsure what long-term use I will have for Facebook in regards to this site. My hope is that it will be a new way for me to communicate with others, meet new people who might be interested in the site and help those in need.

On that note, I’m looking for any advice or suggestions to help make this possible. Please bear in mind that I am still very new to Facebook so, quite literally, no suggestion is too basic.

Thank you in advance for all of your help and I look forward to seeing you online!

My Personal Page
Plagiarism Today’s Blog Page

Some, including Eric Berlin, were very opposed to this while still others, including Louis Gray, saw this as a natural evolution.

But while it is clear that bloggers are interested in reading what others have to say about their content and many work to actively encourage comments on their site, it is unclear where that conversation is going to take place in the next few years.

As more RSS readers, including those that do not republish content publicly, offer users the ability to comment to feeds, the dialog is spreading out.

However, this may not be a bad thing entirely, but rather, an opportunity for someone to help solve a very complicated problem.

How Fractured Conversations Hurt

The problem with fractured comments is that, most likely, there is only a finite number of people interested in a specific post.

If a post does well, it draw a dozen commenters. However, while a dozen people talking about a post in one place makes for a robust conversation, if they comment at twelve different places, then they are just twelve people shouting into deep space.

Though more commenting opportunities may actually draw more people to the dialog, since people typically do not like repeating themselves, it is unlikely that the number will offset how fragmented the conversation has become.

For example, even if the conversation with a dozen people draws in three times as many commenters, that will only leave an average of three people per location, hardly a robust dialog.

Worse, a fragmented conversation is much harder for the blog author to follow and participate in. If a conversation takes place on six different sites, the blog author has to check all of them and then, if interested, respond to each of them.

While certainly a possibility, it assumes that the blogger is even aware of all the conversations, something that is unlikely given how large the Web is. The result is that these conversations almost always exclude the actual author of the entry, just because they are unaware of the existence of the exchange.

For bloggers hungry for feedback, this is very frustrating and very worrisome. In many cases, the conversation is the reward for the post and having it taken away, understandably, very upsetting.

The problem, however, is not new and has been battled, quite literally, for centuries.

An Ongoing Issue

The problem of fragmented conversations, however, is almost as old as marketing itself.

If you’ve ever talked about a product with a friend, had a water cooler conversation about a TV show or called someone to talk about a movie, you’ve helped fragment a conversation.

The companies involved, almost certainly, would rather be able to hear what you had to say, both good and bad, but instead have to deal with millions of conversations taking place beyond their ears. This was a problem before the Web and it continues to be one afterward.

Likewise, with blogs, if you’ve written about a site on a message board, told a friend in person about something you read or email someone an interesting link, you’ve fragmented the conversation there as well. The owner of the site would love to know that you think their content is good enough to recommend or bad enough to hate, but they have little to no way of knowing what you said.

Conversations about your site have always been fragmented and this includes both public and private dialogs. Message boards, chat rooms, newsgroups and even Twitter have long offered a means for people to talk about content away from eye of the author.

What is new about these services is not that they are fragmenting the conversation, but that they are codifying the process. Rather than encouraging people to talk about a certain topic or general area of interest, they are encouraging people to talk specifically about your post and to do it away from your site.

To date, this process has not had a major impact on bloggers as the networks involved have not obtained enough traction. For example, even Shyftr, despite all of the attention, only has a few viable conversations taking place.

However, there are at least a few places that both fragment a conversation and have a strong community behind them. However, they are sites that people actively encourage their sites to appear on and many dream about getting attention from.

The Digg and Reddit Problem

Having been the survivor of two Diggs, I can say safely that, in both cases, more comments appeared on Digg than did my own site. The same is true for Slashdot and any other major social news “bumps” I’ve had here.

This is understandable as these sites all have strong communities within them that like to talk among themselves, but they are still the classic example of a fragmented conversation. After all, the people who commented to Digg did not, for the most part, comment here and if I had not followed the conversations there, I never would have been able to read their thoughts.

Yet, even Webmasters that dislike Shyftr for fragmenting the dialog encourage the use of Digg and Reddit on their site. The reason is that these sites provide a great deal of traffic to bloggers. Digg and Reddit both use content from the sites they link responsibly and encourage their readers to visit the site before commenting, often leading to the dreaded Digg Effect.

The problem with sites such as Shyftr is not that they fragment the conversation, but that they fragment the conversation and the audience. By displaying the full feed publicly and offering a means to comment they encourage their members to both read and comment on the feed in one place.

However, it is easy to imagine a situation where a feed reader, such as Google Reader, allows users to comment on a story from within their site and have it displayed only to other subscribers. This would be less of an audience fragmentation, since all of the readers would be tracked and still getting the content from the original source, but would be fragmenting the conversation.

This creates a problem for bloggers. Where Digg and Reddit fragment a conversation in exchange for increased exposure, this would not increase the audience but would still divide the conversation in two. The would hurt both the conversation itself and the original author.

That could, in the long run, hurt the site itself as many blogs thrive in large part to their conversations.

However, for readers, the convenience of commenting where they land is far too tempting. We can and should expect that RSS readers, as well as other kinds of sites, will attempt to fragment the conversation in order to provide a feature to their users and that many of those sites will not raise copyright red flags, like Shyftr did.

Solving the Problem

What we’re left with is a disjunct. Readers, the few who do regularly comment, want to do so in the easiest way possible while bloggers want to be sure that the conversation leads back to their site.

There have been many attempts to fix this problem, services such as Disqus have attempted to take local conversations and make them global. However, the solutions have focused primarily on the commenter, not the blogger, and solving the issue of unifying the many sites the visitor has participated in.

But while that is important, it does little to help the conversations themselves.

This is an area ripe for a technological solution, a means to take a conversation that is happening in multiple places and unify it, preferably on the original site itself.

However, the barriers to this are obvious. Spam would likely be one of the first problems, along with obtaining a broad enough user-base to be viable. But the more long-term threat would be copyright issues involved in porting over one’s comments from one site to another. After all, a commenter owns the rights in his or her comments and, though an implied license is granted to use the work on the site it was posted, it does not cover moving it to another page.

A real solution to this problem would require a very high level of cooperation both technologically and legally. Ensuring that comment licenses allow cross-posting and that different interfaces work together, including with spam protection systems, is a big challenge.

Still, if such a system could be developed and bloggers could retain control over comments posted to their site, including both editorial control over what appears on their site and export control (in the event that a different system came along), it would likely be something that bloggers would jump upon.

After all, it would theoretically mean more comments and a chance to participate in conversations that never would have been available before.

Conclusions

The bitter truth is that, despite how fragmented conversations are on the Web, they are still more unified here than they ever have been in history.

Though we may think we’re sharing our thoughts with just a few readers on an obscure forum, they are almost instantly searchable and a blogger who is looking at their referrers or doing vanity searches has a good chance at finding these conversations.

Furthermore, though hundreds of sites attempt to fragment the conversation, only a few have enough of an audience to do so in a meaningful way. This means that, currently, dialog fragmentation is very predictable for the most part.

The bottom line is that while our conversations may be fragmented, bloggers have far less of a problem than television networks, newspapers and other businesses do. There is a reason why millions are spent every year on market research, it’s because companies want to know what people are thinking and what they are saying.

As bad as we have it, we are the lucky ones in this area. Furthermore, the problem of fragmented conversations is still nowhere near as severe as the problem of audience fragmentation, the problem created by plagiarism and widespread scraping.

Despite that, one does have to hope that a solution can be found. Just imagine the conversations that we can have if we can actually talk across our self-imposed borders and outside of our communities.

On second thought, given what I’ve seen on Usenet, that may not be such a great idea after all…

This announcement comes just over a month after Mashable discovered an author at the site plagiarizing their content, an incident covered here in episode 35 of the Copyright 2.0 Show.

This move represents a major step on the part of Associated Content to prevent plagiarism by its members and another major client for Attributor, which previously signed both the AP and Reuters as clients.

This will be a major test for both services. Associated Content, which pays money to submitters at the site, will have to decide how to respond to potential cases of plagiarism. This will have to include both incidents involving its submitters as well those involving others on the Web. Attributor, in turn, will see how well their technology detects duplicated content in a very fast-paced setting and in a manner it might not have been originally designed for.

It is unclear at this time if Associated Content will be using Attributor’s image matching service in addition to its text matching tools.

While Associated Content has always utilized human editors to help with quality control at the site, it is clear that, with so much content being posted, automation is going to be critical in effectively filtering out questionable works. Attributor seems to be rapidly positioning itself as a leader in this area and this latest deal only furthers that stance.

Hopefully this partnership will help avoid future embarrassing incidents for Associated Content and let them move past these issues.

Disclosure: I am a consultant for Attributor.

Needless to say, traffic was extremely high yesterday and remains very high today. However, I wanted to welcome all of the new readers of the site and encourage those of you interested in Web-related copyright issues to subscribe to this site’s feed. There will be a lot more coming on these issues, especially as they pertain to social news, very soon.

Second, I would like to thank my host, Media Temple, for keeping this site alive during the storm. I moved to MT after my last host crashed twice under similar burdens, once following a Slashdot, the other following a Digg. MT kept swimming right along, exactly as designed, and hopefully won’t hit me with too much of an overage.

Finally, a thank you also has to go out to everyone who helped with the article, especially Drew Curtis for writing me back so promptly despite his busy schedule.

It was a crazy day yesterday and I’ll be recovering much of the day today. But I am looking forward to returning to my normal schedule this weekend.